"Colleagues at my former outlet, PC World magazine, have told me that Editor-in-Chief Harry McCracken quit abruptly today because the company's new CEO, Colin Crawford, tried to kill a story about Apple and Steve Jobs. The piece, a whimsical article titled 'Ten Things We Hate About Apple', was still in draft form when Crawford killed it. McCracken said no way and walked after Crawford refused to compromise. Apparently Crawford also told editors that product reviews in the magazine were too critical of vendors, especially ones who advertise in the magazine, and that they had to start being nicer to advertisers."

Reviews are always going to be a subjective account of a personal experience - that why whenever i look into buying a new product i check at least two sources to see how the product fairs on average.

True, I remember hearing people complain about a product on a forum - "I'm never going to purchase zyx from ayz again!". When I helped them work through the problem they had, it had nothign to do with their hardware and everything to do with their computer/operating system setup.

Hence one has to take these reviews with several buckets of salt - the outcome of it can be affected by a number of circumstances which seems that most people ignore.

Regarding Toms Hardware, they've received alot of flack, first by the AMD community over their perceived bias towards Intel or in regards to reviewing reviewing graphics cards, how distorted benchmarks can get using standard benchmarking tools.

Arstechnica I've found provides good indepth articles about architecture - so if you want to find out about the inner workings of Core 2, then that is the best place to go.

For hardware reviews, worse case scenario, purchase the hardware, and if it doesn't work reliably within the first 7 days of purchasing it, return it to the place you bought it from, you'll get a refund without any questions asked. If enough people use that service (return in 7 days), the shops will get the message that the hardware is problem prone, and as a result, stop selling it, then the distributor will stop importing it, sending a message back to the company that their hardware is a liability and will no longer be sold through their partners retail channels.

ps. take the 20 minute off, its stupid, I just finished typing this one, and found that the post I was trying to edit was 'expired' when I sent it.